A Joanna Piercy Mystery Series

Book 8

Struggling to keep a tight focus on her work after a miscarriage and relationship breakdown, DI Joanna Piercy resorts to formulaic solutions to solve her cases: having seen the same situations time and again, she assumes all cases have a simple repetitive answer. So when Arthur Pennington enters her office in a state of confused distress and reports that his wife Beatrice is missing, Joanna does not reciprocate his concern. Convinced that his wife is merely involved in an extra-marital affair, Joanna is dismissive of Arthur's concerns. Then Beatrice's strangled body is discovered recklessly dumped on the Leek moorlands and she is forced to re-evaluate her stance. But perhaps Joanna wasn't so far off the mark at all: it seems Beatrice suffered an unrequited love, which Joanna knows can be painful...but she never before believed it could be fatal. A baffling and intriguing mystery, Wings over the Watcher takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the maze-like puzzle of the female psyche.

Book 11

The Final Curtain

by Priscilla Masters

Published 1 January 2013

A former child soap star needs Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy's help - are her claims real-life drama or just an act?

Just back from her honeymoon, the last thing Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy wants deal with on her return to work is nuisance calls from an old lady ringing the police incessantly to report seemingly trivial incidents.

The woman in question is Timony Weeks, a sixties' child star in the once-popular soap Butterfield Farm, who lives in an isolated farmhouse. Is she putting on an act and wasting police time, or is someone really trying to frighten her? Joanna is dubious, but as events become even more creepy and disturbing, her instinct tells her something is not right. What is Timony hiding? As she digs into her past, Joanna discovers a shocking secret. It seems that someone may have sinister intentions towards Timony after all . . .

Book 12

Guilty Waters

by Priscilla Masters

Published 28 November 2014

Cécile Bellange is a worried mother. Her eighteen-year-old daughter Annabelle and her friend Dorothée left Paris for a summer hitchhiking holiday in England, but it's now September and the only contact from them is a postcard sent from the picturesque setting of Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire three months ago. Meanwhile, in England, brothers Martin and James Stuart find a note from two French girls, inviting the finder to meet them at Rudyard Lake. Their enquiries lead them to Mandalay, an upmarket guesthouse where the girls stayed just before their disappearance, and its owner, the creepy peeping tom, Mr Barker. Arriving in England, Cécile Bellange meets Detective Joanna Piercy, who is looking into the girls' disappearance. Soon Joanna must answer two important questions: what is the anxious Mr Barker trying so desperately to hide, and where are Annabelle and Dorothée?

Book 13

Crooked Street

by Priscilla Masters

Published 31 October 2016

Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy investigates the disappearance of a young husband - and discovers all is not as it seems.

Jadon Glover is good-looking, professional, reliable and a perfect husband, according to his wife. So when he fails to return home one miserable March night, she rings the police, certain that something has happened to him. DI Joanna Piercy and DS Mike Korpanski are sceptical: there is no such thing as a perfect marriage. So what is the truth about Jadon?

As the investigation proceeds, it soon becomes apparent that Jadon Glover has been keeping dark secrets from his wife. And as the police pursue their house-to-house enquiries through the claustrophobic, jumbled streets of cramped Victorian terraces, they unearth other secrets from behind the net curtains. But, whatever else has been going on among the inhabitants' quiet, desperate lives, it's clear that at least one of them knows what really happened to Jadon .

Embroidering Shrouds

by Priscilla Masters

Published 4 March 2002

A spate of robberies targeting elderly women has shocked the normally sedate town of Leek to its core. And now it appears that the robbers have moved on to murder. At the eerily named Spite Hall, the body of Nancy Lawrence has been found bludgeoned to death, lying over the tapestry she was in the process of embroidering. Why have the robbers killed this time? When Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy begins her investigation she is surprised to find that the victims next door neighbour is Nan's brother and is even more shocked to discover that the pair have not spoken for years. With the aid of her colleagues, Joanna unravels a mystery - the tangled threads of which a rooted years in the past.

Endangering Innocents

by Priscilla Masters

Published 3 January 2003

Something is amiss at a small primary school in the village of Horton. A local man, Joshua Baldwin, has been sitting in his car outside the school watching the children as they play. So DI Joanna Piercy is called out to investigate. She meets with the teachers and with Baldwin and eventually decides there is nothing to worry about. She is terribly wrong. A few days later little Madeline Wiltshaw goes missing from her home in Horton. Joanna is distraught that she trusted her gut instinct so implicitly, that she was not more suspicious of Baldwin. And the coming weeks will be a testing time for Joanna, as she desperately tries to find young Madeline. But with foot and mouth disease ruling the surrounding countryside off-limits, Joanna's task is made doubly difficult...

Velvet Scream

by Priscilla Masters

Published 28 October 2011

Blood on the Rocks

by Priscilla Masters

Published 30 April 2019

DI Joanna Piercy is not happy when she's assigned the apparently minor case of finding a missing elderly man, but it turns out to be far more sinister . . .

DI Joanna Piercy is irritated at what she perceives to be an attempt to wrap her up in cotton wool during her pregnancy when she is asked to take on the case of Zachary Foster, a missing ninety-six-year-old man suffering from dementia. Zachary has vanished from his residential care home on the edge of Leek during the night with his beloved old teddy bear. He can't have gone far, surely, but how did a frail, elderly man manage to abscond from a secure house at night? As Joanna investigates, it soon becomes clear that this apparently minor case is far more sinister than it first appears. Could her own life, and that of her unborn child, be at risk?

Almost a Whisper

by Priscilla Masters

Published 30 December 2021

A young woman with a pushchair spotted teetering on the edge of a steep rock face on the Staffordshire moors draws Joanna Piercy into a disturbing new case.

A young woman is moving dangerously close to the edge of the rock face, pushing a stroller with a child strapped in it towards the steep drop. She has blood on her clothes. Is she a victim or a would-be killer?

Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy takes on the case when a walker discovers the pair, but the young woman is mute. Is she traumatized or unwilling to speak? Was she about to commit a terrible crime?

As the questions mount, forensic psychiatrist Dr Claire Roget is called in to help. Can she persuade the woman to talk? Joanna desperately needs a breakthrough. But when it comes, her investigation takes a shocking turn . . .

Bloodline

by Priscilla Masters

Published 7 January 2025